On a good day...
...you can.
One a good day, when the energy’s right, the sun’s out and your bike ride to the gym is so unobstructed that you question what dimension you’re actually in. Workout went well, even if the start was slow. Caught my flow after a couple of exercises and things got better. Returned home afterwards, showered, ate and headed up to the studio. I made it there at around 2:15pm or so. Left me plenty of time to finally get somewhere with a new painting that I’ve been working on since last Friday.
I’ve been working on this 50” x 70” painting for a week or so, alternating time with this one with other works, as usual. I think I’ve resolved about 75% of the painting. I’ll take another look at it tomorrow morning to see where I might want to go with it. I had a couple of moments when I was seriously reconsidering scraping part of the upper layer, but my cooler head prevailed.
Every once in a while, I have to talk myself back from the ledge; of not giving in to the momentary urge to change or cover something up in the heat of the moment. I think back to my painting Untethered Variance (2021). It was summer and I was at a point of not frustration with it, but I certainly wasn’t happy with certain colors and forms I’d used. I remember standing, looking at it for a long while that day, trying to see what I wanted to do with it, if anything. I finally gave up and chose to go home for the day. The next day, I looked at it and after making very minor adjustments the painting felt very different to me, even though I’d barely done anything to it. In the fall of that year, I exhibited Untethered Variance in my solo show, Walk Sign Is On at the Bridgette Mayer Gallery. That painting wound up being purchased and brought into the permanent collection of The Pennsylvania Academy of The Fine Arts (PAFA).
After coming so close and seriously altering that painting, this experience had me thinking about how can work to catch myself and be present when I’m feeling a certain way about whatever marks, forms or colors I’m making on a painting. With UV, there were certain colors and forms that triggered a negative association with 1980s design and colors used back then. What changed for me was that I had to say to myself that maybe a viewer won’t have that same reaction; that what I’m feeling is completely based off of my own negative associations. The thing is, everything was actually working well together in the composition. I just had a momentary reaction that almost caused me to change the whole painting over a memory of a feeling about a certain time period. It turns out that no one said anything about the some of the pastel-like colors I used, nor the forms that looked like old gaming displays. It was all in my head.
That’s why I’m trying to be a bit more present and sit with whatever strong emotions that come up as I’m painting. Art is all about emotion and it’s tough to pull ourselves out of whatever reactive state we’re in as we’re working, but it’s worth it to try and step back and out of your head at the same time.
TM